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Shreyas Karle at Project88!
Mumbai – 17th October
Gallery ‘Project 88’ in Mumbai is presenting their show titled ‘Exit Only, No Exit / No Entry, Entry Only’, by contemporary artist Shreyas Karle. This is Karle’s fourth solo exhibition at Project88. With over 95 drawings, paintings, notebooks, and archival material – primarily from CONA, a foundation he co-runs with his partner Hemali Bhuta – this show marks a significant, even surprising shift (or recoil) in Karle’s practice, one that began during the pandemic.
Encountering Karle’s art is often like entering a strange perceptive puzzle, as the constellations of our ordinary signifiers are shuffled, and at times, juxtaposed with the unknown – spaces of contingency, chance, and the passage of time.
As one enters the gallery, the white cube morphs into the familiar space of a classroom, large notice-boards envelop the walls, with raw, exposed paintings gently pinned on their surface. A shrunken, small black chalkboard holds a drawing of Karle’s bizarre title in a grid – Exit Only, No Exit / No Entry, Entry Only – with smudged letters.
As curator Nida Ghouse narrates in her curatorial note: “His compulsion to constantly rearrange interior space on the shifting axes of temperature and time transforms still life into landscape painting. It all begins, he claims, with a feeling that something is amiss, or not where it should be, with seeing what isn’t there, but could be. He imagines it first and wonders if it would work. That is to say, it’s a mental image, that either comes to him or which he projects, but then he goes ahead and transposes reality onto it. We are already dealing with at least two planes. Can the surface of a drawing hold both of them? Or what does the drawing want from him?”
These meticulous configurations of mundane objects appear mystical, as containers of secrets out of our grasp, yet within our line of sight. As the artist foretells, each entry might also be an exit, or perhaps, it’s the other way round. Karle conjures a playful interstice at the threshold of the real, imaginary, and symbolic, one that provokes a deeper way of seeing – you must read closely, but you cannot trust the details.
The exhibition is open till Saturday, 28th October.
Venue: Project 88, BMP Building, Ground Floor N.A. Sawant Marg, Colaba, Mumbai – 400 005
For further information: http://www.project88.in/
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